Tag: Perspectives

. . . And so I went to Dar. For an Asia-Africa conference. It wasn’t just any conference, but something quite different altogether. I would like to say that it wasn’t a field of presentations that only spoke and ignored one another, like the tower of Babel. In reality, everything came from all the senses, … Continue reading Dar Impressions: The Other Story of Asia-Africa Relations

Seldom do we have the privilege to explore the beauty and hardship of a craftsmanship. Thanks to the course "Indigo Liquid Museum", which took me to the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute, located in Nantou, I was able to witness the process of making Indigo dye and even experimented with dyeing myself. Perhaps only … Continue reading Indigo Liquid Museum: A Student’s Account

Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India Parismita Singh ed. 240pp, hardback Zubaan Books, 2017 This book brings you a wealth of stories, in words and images, from a part of India known as the Northeast, a term that is widely contested for the ways in which it homogenizes a region of great diversity. … Continue reading Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India

A recent article in The Chronicle Review addresses the age-old question: Are the humanities in decline? Using data from the National Center for Education and other US-based surveys, the author points out that, despite the popular sentiment that the humanities are perpetually in crisis, there may be real cause for concern today. What catches the … Continue reading Are the Humanities in Crisis?

An exhibition of portraits by Sarah K Khan, titled In/Visible: Portraits of Farmers and Spice Porters of India, is currently on display at New York University's Kimmel Windows Galleries. Khan, a Pakistani-American multimedia artist and scholar with a practice focused on food, culture, women, and migrants, shot the images over the course of a year, from … Continue reading The Real Tastemakers: Portraits of Farmers and Spice Porters in India

Public Domain, Link Jess Auerbach is a member of the Social Science Faculty at the African Leadership University, a brand new African institute of higher education, in Mauritius. Her faculty is making "seven commitments" to "shift educational discourse in a more equitable and representative direction." To make all coursework and reading material open source … Continue reading Jess Auerbach on a decolonial social science curriculum in Africa

Keith Hart wrote in his Letter from Europe, December 2004 in Anthropology Today about how much the university system in England had changed from 1969 when he received his doctorate and the present day. Drawing a line through the labour upheavals off the Thatcher regime, Hart traces the course of how neoliberal economics affected universities. … Continue reading Keith Hart on the British university system

In March 2018, the students of the Government College of Fine Arts in Chennai presented an exhibition titled "Archiving Labour" curated by Krishnapriya CP. In an essay on the experience for The Wire, Krishnapriya writes: Removing themselves from the regular artistic practices of their institutions, the collective of student-artists from the Government College of Fine … Continue reading Krishnapriya C.P. on Archiving Labour